


on birth and circumstance

by kushling



Category: Baahubali (Movies)
Genre: Class Issues, Depression, Hurt/Comfort, Motherhood, Other, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-25 02:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12025758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kushling/pseuds/kushling
Summary: During the days following Bhallaladeva's fall, Devasena feels lost. This story attempts to delve into the mind of a woman torn from her child, then imprisoned, for twenty-five years.





	on birth and circumstance

**Author's Note:**

> never thought i'd write fanfiction for a telugu movie but here i am. i don't have any regrets. also: i think it's really important to address class and caste in works about india, because we as a society (of indians) have still not moved past it. i tried to comment on it a little, please give me feedback if i did it in a nuanced way. #downwithcastedivisions

During these difficult first few months after Bhallaldeva’s fall, Devasena turns two distinct words over in her head from morning to night: birth and circumstance.

From morning to night, the household staff takes care of every aspect of her life, such that she is only ever alone in her thoughts. After all, Devasena is no longer a queen, but a queen mother—one step higher and she would be Mahishmati Devi herself. As soon as even a single sun ray enters her quarters from the wide, silk-curtained windows by her bedside, a servant woman is at her side with a fan sewn of banana fronds to shield her from it. Perhaps a queen mother of a time long past might have had felt the need to wake early, demanding as a queen mother’s duties are, but given Devasena’s imprisonment over the past twenty-five years, the general household consensus is that she should rest.

But it’s counterintuitive. Devasena rises anyways, precisely at the moment during which that first maid enters. She has memorized their faces, their strides, the utter devotion they shower upon her. Vidya is the banana-frond servant. Ranganayaki is the one who brings her a steaming cup of sweet chai promptly after. Jyotishri is the young teenager, barely thirteen, who lays out her clothes for the day, neatly pressed, and Raghavamma is the old woman who bathes her, hands simultaneously rough from age but gentle in their ministrations.

And these are only the morning women.

Her days are busy. Not many are aware of the depressions that weigh on Devasena’s mind as she goes about doing her duty in healing the kingdom, both in and out of the palace, the way a queen mother should. She is stoic, resolute, efficient. Her only times of honesty and solace are when she sits by Mukunda himself and leans her head on his bronze calves, thinking, thinking, ruminating, on birth, circumstance, birth, circumstance, birth—until a servant girl eventually brings her to attention, snapping her out of her daze.

Her son is busy. He visits her every night to sit at her feet, to learn about her, his mother, but Devasena has few words to share with him, eager though he is to listen. What he wants to hear she only knows in images, not words: the exact temperature of the wind that blew on the day she first met his father; the sound of the waves rushing far below her feet the first time she touched her lips to his, the simultaneous pain and ecstasy of Mahendra exiting her womb, all those years ago.

Mahendra asks his people to call him Sivudu. Devasena is the only one who doesn’t comply. His birth, his circumstance, has not informed him of the weight that a name holds, the divine astronomical rituals that surround the giving of a name. He does not understand, as she always has, the ways of royalty. No servants attend to him—everything he does, he does on his own; he bathes himself, he dresses himself, and he cooks for himself, but it is natural to him the way it never was for herself and for Amarendra when they left the palace during their fatal exile.

What kind of ruler will Mahendra make? And what kind of queen will young Avantika be, headstrong as she is? These are the questions that Devasena wants to ask her young son, but she cannot communicate with the ghost of the man she once loved. And so Mahendra exits in a respectful but stilted silence. This goes on for a month, then two, then three, but still Sividu never fails to visit, and it puts her on edge—he is so different from her. She is not his mother. She is not Sangha, who lives in closer quarters to Mahendra than she does. And she never will be. She is worlds apart from him, worlds apart from herself—and she fears she will never come home.

Gopala listens. Her forehead against his calves, she communicates to him, pouring the frustrations and confusions of her mind to his sweet smile, his understanding dark face. He is the only one she kneels before, the only one she sits beneath.

One day, she sits there for longer than usual without any disturbance, her body utterly motionless, her mind running faster than a lioness hunting prey. She does not know what time it is, what day it is, what year it is when she hears footsteps in her periphery, and then the soft voice of an older woman calls her to attention, saying, “Amma.”

What a curious word, “Amma.” 

And then Devasena does the unthinkable: she loses herself. A queen mother would never seek solace in a servant woman, would never let her vulnerability show. But she is so, so disoriented. And so she responds, “Where am I?”

Immediately she regrets it. Composing herself, she rises, touching her hands to Krishna’s feet in a brief goodbye, and turns, her face set, expecting to hear something literal from Raghavamma, the servant woman before her. After all, that Devasena was speaking in terms of the existential would surely never cross the mind of a mere servant. 

But Raghavamma catches her off-guard. She responds, simply, “Somewhere safe.”

And Devasena has to re-evaluate everything she knows about the world—about birth, about circumstance, about herself and her place in the world.

That night, when Mahendra enters her room, she knows something has changed.

“Amma,” he calls her.

“Sivudu,” she responds, and for the first time in months, they talk, and Devasena knows that in due time, she will feel at home once again.


End file.
